Old Stones

By A.S. Penne

Old Stones is an emotional dive into a family shaped by class, background and war.

 

After years of wondering why her mother seemed so different from other moms, author A. S. Penne set out to explore her background. Behind the search was a "niggling feeling" that, despite her Canadian nationality, perhaps England was her 'real' home.

 

At the end of WW II, Penne's mother left her English homeland to rejoin a badly-injured and already-repatriated new husband.  The rough Atlantic crossing heightened her anxiety and anticipation about life in a foreign land with a war-scarred husband.  But Elizabeth was an adventurer, another of the 50,000 war brides who emigrated from Britain and Europe bringing a different lifestyle and culture to her new world.  The generation of children from those wartime unions inherited dual legacies that made 'home' a difficult place to define.

 

Penne embarks on an up-close and personal journey to investigate the abandonment of her mother's upper-class background for a very working-class life with a Canadian RCAF pilot. Through a series of interviews with her parents and careful readings of old documents and letters, the author probes the story of a marriage that almost ended in tragedy before it began.

 

In the end, Penne does indeed find home, but in a place she least expects it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penne Ink
• Release date: Aug 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781771367592

Book preview

OLD STONES

a family biography

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Copyright  © 2002 by A. S. Penne

First edition

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, audio recording or otherwise – without the permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying, a licence from CANCOPY, Toronto, Canada, except for brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper, magazine or web file.

Cover design and layout by Leanne Penner, cover photo by A.S. Penne

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Penne, A. S. (Anthea S.)

Old Stones / A.S. Penne

ISBN  978-1-77136-759-2

1.  Penne, A. S. (Anthea S.)     2.  Penne family.     3.  British Canadians – Biography.     4.  Sechelt (B.C.)    I.  Title

Dedication

This book is for my mother and in memory of my father (1923-2002)

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Betty Keller for her longstanding efforts at bringing this book to print and to Edna Sheedy for her unfailing confidence in my abilities. For their continuous moral support, friendship and sometimes on-demand critiques, I thank Alys Howe and Anna Nobile. For their input at workshopping sessions, I am grateful to Jo Hammond (and husband Dick), Eve Smart and Dorothy Fraser. For her patience with my heel-digging, I also thank Vivian Sinclair. And finally, I am forever grateful to my parents for having the willingness and courage to share their personal stories, without which this manuscript would never have been written.

Table of Contents

Prologue: A Foreign Language

Belonging

Young Lessons

Going Back

In the Beginning

Exodic Memories

Family Practice

Family Secrets

Resting Places

One Big Happy

Fraser Canyon Summers

Measures of Worth

Motherland

Apples and Oranges

Perpetuated Lies

London 1940

Living in the Doldrums

Little Ironies

Foreign Affairs

Family Plot

Below the Salt

A Matter of Time

End of the Day

Out of Darkness

Cold Feet

Familiar Intimacies

Arrival

Buried Memories

Fathers, Sons, Family Ghosts

In a Family Way

Relatively Speaking

Put to Rest

Personal Encounters

Early Dreams

Going Home

Survival of the Species

Prehistoric Millstones

Final Regrets

Epilogue: So Far from Home

Prologue

A Foreign Language

It began with my name.

My parents, Eric and Elizabeth, named me after their mothers, a time-honoured custom of the finest WASP tradition. And it must have been that my English grandmother was more in favour than the Canadian one at the time of my christening, because it is her name that has coloured my life.

When I was little, the usual reaction to my name would make me clam up, refuse to say it again. It was the audible surprise that always threw me, made me doubt my own existence.

What is it? they’d ask, eyes opening wide. Or, if they were Americans, Say again? And I’d frown or shrug, let my vision blur so I couldn’t quite see their amazement. But I’d cry about it later, complain to my mother that she’d given me a weird name.

By the time I was a teenager, explaining my name had become a full-fledged performance and my adolescent friends rolled their eyes whenever they had to introduce me. Sometimes they gave my nickname — Annie — trying to avoid the questions that followed as inevitably as Vancouver’s rain. Eventually I became protective of my heritage, proud of its uniqueness, and annoyed if I discovered someone else using it, someone with no idea of the history behind this family heirloom.

Anthea. I pronounce it slowly for new ears, moving my lips carefully so they can watch and copy me.

And the usual response: Hi, Andrea — nice to meet you.

Then I smile patiently, suppressing the urge to sigh in exasperation. No, I say. It’s ‘Anthea.’ With a ‘th’ in the middle.

Athena?

Not quite. Same letters, twisted around. A-N-T-H-E-A.

A slight pause.

A-N-T-H …?

E-A, I finish for them.

Some consternation.

Well, that’s a different one. Haven’t heard that before. Anthe … ?

Anthea, I pronounce again.

I watch their lips move with effort as they feel the name on their palates. Where’s it from? they ask, doubtful frowns on their brows. I can almost read their thoughts then: Why would someone give their child such a strange name? What’s wrong with Sue or Janet?

Then inwardly I grimace, consider how much to tell them before shrugging. It’s an old family name. From my mother’s mother.

Oh? Eyebrows raised. Must be some kind of foreigner.

English, I explain, hoping to summarize in that one word all the twists and turns intestinal to the story. The subtle shades of family blood that have never homogenized, the nuances of foreignness that persist despite three generations of domestic wars on two continents.

But most people are on a different tack, wanting only to make conversation.

What’s your last name? they ask hopefully. Is it a different one too?

And when I was young, I smirked in embarrassment, rolling my eyes heavenward in search of leniency. Unbelievable, to me, that my parents could have had the bad taste to combine such discordant names.

Brown. Waiting for the laughter.

But first their heads shake from side to side, as if ashamed for me.

Fancy first name, plain second name! Upper-class aspirations, working-class reality.

And then my thoughts explode with a maelstrom of words begging to defend and explain. You don’t understand, I want to say. About the opposing realities of those two names and the force of their confused apposition. The not knowing which heritage to claim and the wishing I could be proud of both but wanting none of either.

This is where I have come from, where I have spent half my life. Searching for a place to call home despite a nagging feeling that I am without roots. This is how I came to be here, wading through the family archives. By daylight, now, I dream old lives into reality while at night, walking the dog under northern constellations, I search for my ancestors in the watery light above.

Seesawing through the memories, I begin to find my way home.

Belonging

TWO DOLL-PERFECT faces look out of my parents’ engagement photo, one with hair swept up in the fashionable waves and peaks of the time, the other with a wry smile, almost as if he knew what he was doing. These are the untainted versions of those same faces which today are wrinkle- and jowl-laden. If I thin the hair on Eric’s head and thicken the eyebrows, I can see his lawyerly glare beneath the furrowed brow. But Elizabeth looks nothing like the old lady she has become.

The family backbone has always been a pride of pedigree, but a pedigree that varies according to which side of the Atlantic I am on. My father’s people are Canadian pioneers, later the rough-around-the-edges working class of early Vancouver, and my mother’s ancestors were English industrialists, landed gentry who depended on large battalions of servants to run outsized estates. These two extremes of culture, attitudes that have never successfully meshed, survive only to counter each other in an act that began with my parents’ marriage.

On the western front, I am a sixth-generation Canadian, but it is my mother’s background, that tangle of branches and roots planted so staunchly in English soil, which dominates this story.

She came from the protected world of the English upper class, from one of those snobbish family homes with an army of servants. As a young woman she wanted out, wanted more than anything to get away from that world, but she could never have dreamed the future that unfolded for her.

And it is only when I delve into her past that I begin to understand the distance she has travelled from English gentry to a classless Canadian society; from being coddled by a cocoon of servants to having to do everything by and for herself. Yet there is more to Elizabeth than her well-heeled background. There is something different, something extraordinary about her makeup, something that I too may contain in my genes. So when I sit down to interview my mother, I am ostensibly asking about her past, but I am also self-consciously searching for another, less identifiable quality of character.

I am hoping, by examining my parents’ journey, to find my own way home.

I must have been incredibly naïve at 21, Elizabeth starts. About the equivalent of a 14-year-old girl in Canada, probably. I think I never really considered the possible problems of moving halfway around the world.

We have not begun at the beginning, but I allow her this liberty.

We’d originally planned that Eric would stay in England after the war, but when he was sent home, I was just anxious to rejoin him in Vancouver.

With no idea where she was headed, no knowledge of the in-laws or the country or even the lack of culture she’d find there, Elizabeth turned away from her native land without a thought. It seems an extreme reaction, moving halfway round the globe to escape family, but the question that piques me most is, who would I be if she’d stayed in England? In my mind I see English school children in their knee socks and blazers, and I wonder: would I have been a better Englishwoman than a Canadian?

I step back, try to imagine the transatlantic voyage that took her away from the known world of her youth, picturing the converted troop ship, its decks crowded with war brides waving goodbye. And my mother, having no one to wave to — did she concentrate on the invisible shoreline ahead instead of the one receding behind her? Or was she wondering, watching the diminishing strip of green on the horizon, whether she might never see it again? On a cold day in February 1945, Elizabeth was heading somewhere it would not be easy to return from, certainly not affordable for many years. I consider how it must have felt to abandon everything familiar, and the desperation of that long-ago leave-taking makes my eyes water. Already.

Elizabeth continues talking, but I drift away as her facial expression blurs in front of me. I focus on her wool suit, cameo brooch on the lapel and pearl necklace at her neck, and force myself to come back to her voice. I need to understand more about the girl who made the rash decision to marry a colonial, go so far from home.

I ask her what I ask every immigrant.

Where’s home, Mom — here or there?

And she doesn’t hesitate, despite some harsh early years in Toronto with small babies and no friends, not even relatives to talk to while her husband hid behind mounds of law books.

Canada, definitely, she declares.

How is it possible, I wonder, to live your youth in one country and call another land home?

When I come home, I’m always glad to be back, my mother is saying.

I picture my mother inside a jet, stray whiffs of cloud drifting across the wing as the plane drops through the sky, and I remember the English patchwork of green and brown fields as seen from above. But when I look up and catch her eyes, I realize my mistake. She is speaking of Canada, not England.

Over Iceland, over Greenland, sometimes stopping to refuel in Newfoundland, Elizabeth has spent the last four decades crossing the North Pole at least once a year, going home to England, home to Canada. She’s as much at home in a thick, Scandinavian sweater, face lit by the blaze of a campfire at my father’s lakeside Cariboo hideaway, as she is in an English drawing room, drinking tea from a delicate Spode cup.

And her confident declaration of home only serves to underline my own confusion. Why am I not as clear as she whether the rugged peaks of B.C.’s Coastal Range or the worn green hills of west England are where I belong?

Elizabeth may not understand my struggle, but as a mother she has a strong desire to help. Sometimes now, when she is rummaging through her drawers in an effort to tidy up, she finds something that reminds her of my quest. Today she unearths a book from beneath a tangle of ribbon, stationery and wrapping paper in her desk, and she holds it out to me with a shy tentativeness.

Perhaps this will be of interest to you? she asks, unsure of what, exactly, I’m after.

It is a thin notebook from her secretarial days, a compilation of correspondence etiquette. I flip through it half-heartedly, not wanting to disappoint her, but sure it is nothing applicable to this story. I stop at a page of salutations, fresh evidence of the foreign world she’s described so often.

To the Queen, I read out loud, "a formal letter begins with May it please your Majesty, but a social letter begins with Madam. The envelope should read To the Queen’s most excellent Majesty for formal purposes, and To her Majesty the Queen for social purposes." I laugh at the old-fashioned dictum, shake my head disapprovingly, a devout non-monarchist. Elizabeth is dismayed, chagrined by my blatant disrespect.

But Mom, I protest when I notice her face. "When does anyone write a social letter to the Queen!"

She lifts her head just slightly, stands a bit taller, not amused. The Queen has friends too, you know!

"But really — do her friends have to call her ‘Your Majesty?’ I mean, it’s so pompous, for heaven’s sake!"

"Well, she is the Queen, after all."

I stare at the evident disgust on her face and look away, avoiding contention by concentrating on the rest of the notebook. The pages open at sketches of insignia for the different military ranks, and once again I stop, interested, but also amazed by this radically different education from my own. Moments like these leave me feeling suspended between two worlds. Though I am born and raised a Canadian, and despite my search for a strong North American ancestor to ease the overseas draw, I feel closer to my English relatives. At the same time, however, there is an unfamiliar set of rules in my mother’s past, the rudiments of which are so foreign to me that complete acceptance of my English background seems impossible. The world Elizabeth came from was constructed around an innate sense of what’s done or not done; an inherent appreciation of life which was — perhaps still is — governed by seemingly arbitrary and ancient codes of behaviour. But many of these rules, like the etiquette regarding social dealings with the Queen, are utterly incomprehensible, even ridiculously false, to a middle-class North American.

I remember, during a dinner at my English grandmother’s house, being sent to the pantry for a wine glass. I stood before the wall of glass-fronted cupboards, overwhelmed by the number and pieces of crystal stemware. Eventually, aware that the others were waiting, I selected a middling-sized wine glass, carried it back through the narrow hallways and presented it hopefully to my grandmother. The quiet seconds after I put the glass on the table were filled quickly by the realization that something was wrong. Later, I overheard my grandmother quizzing my mother about the kind of education my sister and I were receiving in Canada.

But she doesn’t know the difference between a claret and sauterne glass, my dear. From the landing above the drawing room, I could hear the frown in Anthea’s voice.

Sometimes, despite my dual homing instincts, the chasm between these two worlds feels too large to bridge.

Young Lessons

MY MOTHER WAS fed, entertained and contained in the nursery of Coates Manor, an ancient Gloucestershire seat whose name can be found in the Domesday Book. It was a conservative country house in which the traditional rule of thumb regarding children — that they should be seen and not heard — was upheld, though in Elizabeth’s case the rule was more like neither seen nor heard.

Elizabeth, rebelling against her upbringing as stuffy and old-fashioned, raised my siblings and me by oscillating between the two extremes of free reign and strict discipline. In contrast to our mother’s childhood, my brothers, sister and I careened through hallways and gardens, scattering toys and yells. We thundered across adult boundaries, totally unaware of the existence of grown-up sanctuaries. And depending on Elizabeth’s ability to cope at any given moment, we were either indulged or reprimanded.

Stories from my continuum of memories alternately please or embarrass my mother, depending on their content. She smiles softly as I recall the drizzly school day when she surprised my sister and me with a bowl of anxious goldfish during a lunch of homemade french fries. But she frowns at my memory of the winter afternoon when I fell on glitzy, plastic dress-up shoes during my brother’s birthday party, and she, annoyed, had to take me to the doctor to remove a metal buckle digging into my kneecap.

My sister and I often sat in the middle of a floor littered with the toys my mother never had, romanticizing stories from that long-ago childhood in front of an English nursery hearth. We dreamed of growing up and going back, returning to the protective cocoon of servants on a large estate, playing out our 1950s fantasy of marrying well, living happily ever after and being surrounded by leisure, money, irresponsibility. So far removed from that peaceful Gloucestershire manor, Elizabeth’s stories served to camouflage our ordinary Canadian life so that only now can I appreciate the reality of what she survived during the transition to her new home.

Finding a place for herself in the more or less classless society of post-war Vancouver, struggling to be a parent in a world that revered children as much as the Brits ignored them, Elizabeth had to ad lib her way through those early years in Canada. Like most North American mothers in the 1950s, she performed as gardener, cook, chauffeur and maid — an enormous challenge for someone who’d never had to do any housework while growing up. In the wilds of the Canadian west and without any prior experience at running a household, Elizabeth learned the hard way, experimenting and making mistakes as she went along. She gave us what she knew, though some of it was too old-world to be of any use except, possibly, to confuse.

She taught my sister and me to sew, showing us the dainty embroidery stitches and careful running stitches of a household seamstress, sitting beside us like her own granny had beside her, demonstrating, watching, encouraging. And smiling, proud, when I brought home a gold-on-brown embossed badge, the Brownie award for achievement at needlework.

I try to imagine my mother as a child, seated next to her staunchly Victorian grandmother, matriarch of the clan. But that vision fades and is replaced by the faces of my old-world grandmother and great-aunt, the two members of English family so important in my Canadian upbringing. Granny Payne, the woman who was my namesake, and Great-Aunt Molly are the ones who told me about the others, those people whose faces are caught in family photographs but whose characters are only stories for me.

Can we go over your mother’s homes? I ask my mother. Elizabeth takes a deep breath and then, counting on her fingers, lists the three homes prior to Coates Manor, the final family seat.

Whirlow House, she explains, is near Sheffield, the house where Anthea — Mother — was born. The house where BAF and MLF lived when they were first married. Elizabeth uses the initials inscribed on all the silver and books — everything inherited from Mary Lewton and Bernard Alexander Firth, her grandparents — the way the rest of us do, as family code for our ancestors.

They moved to the large Sheffield estate, Norton Hall, while the children were still small, she continues. And then they went to Clifton Maubank in Dorset. That was the house near Yeovil in Somerset, where I was born. The spooky old house, she reminds me. The one Aunt Molly loved to tell ghost stories about.

My memory flits back to an English summer as I remember …

Clifton Maubank, my great-aunt Molly begins, was the old, old house that —

"Oh don’t tell them those stories again! Molly’s sister, Anthea — my grandmother — rolls her eyes. Really! (Rally!")

My dear Anthea, Molly returns, eyebrows raised in mock surprise, "they want to hear the stories again. Don’t you, girls? She looks at my sister and me. And the large grey eyes of little sister Bizzy — a nickname that stuck after my first attempt at Elizabeth came out as Bizbuz" — grow as dark as the ravine back home, while I, at 10 or 11, scoff at her fear.

Molly begins again, starting with the story of the old woman whose face looked out the small attic window above the gables at Clifton Maubank. The sad visage gazed tiredly from beneath a bonnet of yellowed lace, but by the time someone else came to look, the woman had disappeared.

Bizzy, eyes widening dangerously, turns to look at my mother. She reaches out a hand for reassurance, then faces Molly again.

Then there was the horse and carriage that could be heard for several minutes, coming up the long gravel drive, clop clop! Molly’s ringed hands dance in the air, imitating the prancing hooves. But when the servants were sent to see who it was, there was nobody there! Molly shakes her head to underline the inexplicable, then adds in a whisper, It happened at least once a week.

And Bizzy slides back toward my mother’s chair, presses against Elizabeth’s stockinged legs.

Were there any other ghosts? I urge.

Oh heavens, yes! There was an old monk in brown robes who used to wander through the gardens at unusual times, early mornings in the mist or mid-afternoons at teatime. And there was a white hare which somehow materialized inside the house, but by the time a gun was fetched, it had shot out the door into the garden and could not be found anywhere. Just when we’d set our minds on rabbit stew!

Molly’s eyes gleam, delighted with her dark powers.

Tell us the other one, Aunt Molly, I beg. The one about the chairs!

Molly winks